Environmental Inequality: Toxicity, Health, and Justice

3 units

How are the problems of environmental stress, pollution, and degradation unevenly borne? Adopting cross-cultural, biosocial, intersectional, and posthumanist approaches, this course explores how exposures to environmental toxicities and dangers result in and exacerbate health harms, social disparities, and structural violences. A range of historical and contemporary case studies will include plagues, weather, fire, water, waste, minerals, air, etc. Students will not only gain an understanding of these problems and burdens, but also explore the transformative potential in intertwining environmental justice, critical global health, and social justice movements to seek solutions to these vital issues.